Welcome back to Line of Blood. I'm Jana Marcus.

Last time, me and my team of investigators, which included Mark-the-Cop and Maria-the-Psychic, we had ventured to Brooklyn to retrace the steps of Abe's last night alive. These were based on eyewitness accounts, news articles, and Maria's visions, which added a whole new layer to the investigation.

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The trip had been enlightening in many ways. More and more details were surfacing about Abe's last night alive. When we went to Abe's Lincoln Place headquarters in the building's basement, we found it to be toxic and disgusting. We needed tools and gear to really look through it. So, we never got started.

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But, Maria was insistent that important evidence was buried there that we had to find. And, she said this was both paperwork and physical objects, like an insignia ring for Abe's gang.

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One of Maria's many revelations was how the police had abducted Abe and then taken him to a secluded location where he was killed. Mark-the-Cop was able to decipher what Maria-the-Psychic was seeing and we found the location. And it looked exactly as Maria had described it. This brought up the big question. Had Abe been killed someplace else and then the body moved to where it was finally found, which was several blocks away on the passenger seat of his car on a very busy street?

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The idea that he had been killed elsewhere was never reported in any of the papers. But the idea was not a foreign one. Cousin Leo had alluded to this fact almost two decades earlier. I had dismissed it, but now I was thinking twice about what Leo had said. And how did Leo know this information?

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 This is Episode 8: The Men Who Knew Too Much.

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Once back home in California, the medical examiner's report of Abe's body, which I had obtained at the Municipal Archives, was on my mind. Maria had seen Abe tied up under the tracks, made to kneel by the police car with the 69 on it. So, I was curious if the report actually recorded ligature marks on his wrists.

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The report was confusing to me as it was in medical language that I just didn't understand. So, I focused on the parts that I did. The long report was filled with descriptions of Abe's car, the clothes he wore and the police who recovered his body from the automobile on Empire Boulevard. It said the case was earmarked for the DA's office.

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Well, Abe's age and the spelling of his last name, it actually differed throughout the entire report. The internal organs were examined during the autopsy and his brain tested negative for alcohol content. But curiously, it seemed his body was not examined for external marks, bruises, or even cuts.

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Well, even to a novice like me, this seemed like a huge oversight. I would not be able to substantiate if there were marks on his wrists, the way Maria had envisioned.

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Another curious item to me was that the report stated there were blood stains on the front of Abe's shirt, but his white undershirt was markably stained only on the back. Well, how could that be? If he died in his car, propped up on the passenger side of the sedan, the blood pattern didn't make sense, right? I mean, it should have just pooled on the backside of his shirt. Well, and then check this out: there was no mention of eyeglasses found on him, which we know he needed. And the hat that he was wearing in the crime scene photos? Well, it's not reported as having a hole in it or bloodstains. I did not fully understand this report, but I knew something wasn't right here.

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Mark-the-Cop had gone away on vacation, so I called upon two friends from the Seven Point Star Group in Northern California to help me understand this report. Consultants Julie and Patrick had extensive homicide investigation and criminology backgrounds and Julie, she was an expert at crime scene recreation.

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Well, the first thing they asked me was to see the photos that accompanied the ME 's report, but there was none. Julie was sure that ME 's were photographing bodies as far back as the 1940s and there should be at least a drawing. Well, if they existed, the Municipal Archives did not have them in their files.

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Despite the lack of photos, Julie and Patrick were able to analyze the recorded facts. They came to my home with graphs, drawings, and a blue gun, which is a demonstration non-firing gun, and they had all kinds of items to recreate the crime scene.

We started with the gunshot wounds. The reports said that the first gunshot on the left side of the neck, below the ear, had traveled at a 45-degree angle upward through the head and exited on the upper right side of Abe's skull.

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The wound was surrounded by a contusion collar. Well, I found out that a contusion collar means that it was a closeup shot that caused bruising from the barrel of the gun. It also meant that Abe was alive after the shot, and that's because the body has to start producing histamines to heal itself, but can only do that if your heart is still beating.

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The second bullet, directly behind the ear, entered at a 30-degree angle and lodged in the rear of the skull. It was also a close up shot with a contusion collar. That meant he was still alive and breathing, even after the second shot.

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As Patrick and Julie explained, If Abe had been shot in his car, the only way the angle of the bullets could have happened, as reported, is if they were close up. His head had to be tipped down in order for the second bullet to enter the skull at the reported 30-degree angle.

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Well, Patrick hypothesized, let's say that the shooting took place in the car. The assailant would have had to have been behind him from the left, tilting the gun. That would have been difficult for anyone if they were driving or next to him. So, the shooter was probably in the back seat, which meant he'd have to have been a left-handed shooter.

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If Abe was seated in the car when he was killed, he would've bled out of the lowest wound, the bottom part of the back of his skull, and that would've bled onto his shoulder and down the back, the blood pooling where he was seated. But, as Julie stated, the pooling in the report didn't support that he was seated in the car. We can see from the crime scene photos that the car was clean. There was no blood spatter or brain matter anywhere. And there was nothing on the doors or the windshield.

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Patrick made note that what wasn't recorded on the report was the time difference between the two shots. The ME should have been able to estimate how much time had transpired before the shot was fired. He believed there was a period of time where Abe was critically and fatally wounded, but still breathing.

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All of this meant that Abe had to have been on the ground, with his head tipped down for the 30-degree angle of the bullet. It would have been very difficult to get those angles if he was sitting upright in his car. The idea that the body was moved was also supported by the blood smear on the front of the shirt. As Julie and Patrick told me, it was a transfer of blood from picking him up and moving him. This was gruesome, but fascinating

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Well, they confirmed my suspicions, added some surprises, and they even verified Maria's visions. Maria had said he was still alive after the first shot. She had also said that the bullet had exited the right side of his head. And the trajectory of the bullets demonstrated that he may have been kneeling when he was shot. And the body was moved and staged. This was exactly what Maria had told me.

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Well, Patrick said there's so much that wasn't said in the report that it seems to have really been done in a hurry. This report is not a thorough post mortem. There's no description of the outside of the body and nothing about what may have been under his nails, the condition of his knuckles, dirt on his shoes.

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Patrick felt someone wanted this done fast, to get it over with and buried. Julie summarized that she felt the records were sanitized, especially since there was no police report that could be found and there were no witnesses.

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When Mark returned from vacation, I asked his opinion of the report as well. And over video, we hashed out the details again. And overall, he agreed with Julie and Patrick's findings, especially in regards to the moving and the staging of the body.

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As Mark said to me, “There doesn't seem to be a crime scene report, and something had to have been written, because this was a big news story. Required documents and notes had to be taken and preserved. But, Jana, it's interesting that there is none of that in Abe's case. The ME is very detailed about the internal organs, which have no bearing on the murder whatsoever. So, where's the drawing of the body?" As Mark said, “1941 ain't that long ago. It's not like this happened in 1841.”

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Mark snickered and he said, “Look at it this way. The perps got Abe into their car, and it's never easy to abduct a guy, no matter what size he is. Wouldn't Abe have put up a fight? Was his clothing ripped? If the ME was really trying to solve a homicide, he'd have documented things that were lacking or unremarkable, but there's no description of his body. It's weird that there's nothing else in the report, and the ME wouldn't even make a comment to support the negative, such as, ‘I found no other markings of note,’ he should have done this just to show he was doing his job accurately.”

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So, Mark agreed with Patrick and Julie. When something smells rotten, it usually is. If the ME supposedly left information out, it was for a reason.

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But as I've been saying all along, the bigger question is, why? Why all the cover ups?

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Meanwhile, on other fronts, Maria was having constant dreams about Lincoln Place. We had a session where Abe and Frankie actually came through and described where we needed to look for a valuable piece of information in the basement. They said it was in a crevice somewhere near the old dumbwaiter. Frankie also described to Maria where he was buried, in a brick tunnel that flowed to water.

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I asked Maria, where do we go from here? And she replied, “There is important information that Frankie needs us to find. I really think, Jana, we've got to go back to Lincoln Place.”

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Go back? I was intrigued, but, you know, I felt satisfied with the trip we had made. And, I didn't know how I would afford to get us all back there again. But over the next few weeks, Maria became more and more adamant about returning to the Lincoln Place headquarters. She felt there was unfinished business there and that Frankie's spirit needed a clearing.

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Okay, well, who was I to say no to the spirit of Uncle Frankie? I felt there were powers beyond my control sort of happening here, and I was gonna try to find a way. So, I did a GoFundMe page, and within a month, we had raised enough funds for all of us to get back to New York, and this time, bring a videographer. So me and the team, well, gosh, we were actually looking at a proposed date of late summer to return to Brooklyn.

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But how would we get back into Lincoln Place? The young man who had let us in in March, well, he had moved. But I did have the name of his roommate. So I sent Mark-the-Cop and my researcher pal Eric on the trail to find her. Well, they did, and she said she'd leave us a key. So, it looked like we really were going back to Brooklyn.

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I also followed up with Detective Stradford of the Cold Case Squad to see if he had made any progress in finding the murder investigation report for Abe. Well, he had nothing. He explained to me that there was no single department that actually looked for old report requests. There was just one person who traveled to the Hoboken or Long Island warehouses and found what they could. Stradford had said that he had made over 13 requests for cold case files in the last six months and only received two back. He told me that a case from 1941 would not be a priority.

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You know, it was becoming really clear to me why Abe had never been mentioned in any of the gangster histories. There was no information.

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The Municipal Archives and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice archives, they had nothing. The police investigation on his murder, it was nowhere to be found. Record clerks at the courthouses and police departments were just not interested in helping find old records.

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Or, I was told that they were not able to release the information. Which seemed odd since the case was so old. Well, the files around Uncle Abe's case were shrouded and inaccessible. I would have to just continue to put my hopes on Detective Stradford. It would be worth the wait if something ever surfaced.

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 So we had five months before we were all gonna go back to Brooklyn. We had to finish raising the money, we had to get the crew together, we had a bunch of things to get in order, but at the same time, I was also trying to find arrest records for Frankie.

I finally tracked where felony court records were stored in the 1940s. But you wouldn't believe it, the warehouse had actually burned down literally a week before I called.

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Well, I went back to searching the online newspapers, and this time I decided to expand my search beyond the mid 1940s, When he supposedly went missing. Well, bingo! Part of the searching that was so difficult was that the family's last name had a dozen different spellings and was different for each of Abe's brothers.

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But in the classified section of the 1953 Brooklyn Eagle, there was an announcement. It said that Frank Bobchook, a.k.a., Balzak, please come to surrogate court on June 1st of 1953 to settle his mother's estate and a case that was pending by Grandma Rae's fourth husband.

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Whoa, this was wild! What? Okay. Great Grandma Anna, Abe, Frankie, and Rae's mother, had been gone for almost eight years. But the case was in probate, and they needed Uncle Frankie to show up.

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Well, luck was on my side, because the classified ad actually had a surrogate court case number listed. Finally, I was getting a break. Well, I called the court to get a copy of the case, and when they found it, they said the file was so large, they couldn't send it to me.

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So, I sent my sister, Valerie, down to the courthouse archives to xerox. It took her almost three hours! And, I was texting her like every 15 minutes for a morsel of a clue.

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Well, it winds up, this was invaluable. As I read through this huge document, it seemed as though a tremendous search had taken place by the court for over a year to find Uncle Frankie.

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The court needed to disperse Frankie's inheritance before they could close the proceedings, which by 1953, eight years after great grandma's death, everyone involved was anxious to have done. All the family members were contacted by a court appointed special guardian to discuss what they knew about Uncle Frankie's whereabouts.

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Well, the oldest sibling, Dave, said he hadn't seen Frankie since 1947. Older sister Bertha and another brother Ike, well, they just never even responded to the court. Grandma Rae, well, she said she thought Frankie was dead.

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This document was a goldmine. It contained Frankie's arrest records, his jail term information, his probation information, and all of his aliases, which included the name Frank Goldstein.

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There was even a letter from the FBI signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself. The letter said that they had no information on Uncle Frankie. But you know what? This letter was a follow-up from a first letter by an FBI agent claiming that they could not give out any information about Uncle Frankie. Then Hoover's letter followed up saying, “Oh, we just don't have any information.” Hmm, that seemed a little fishy.

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Well, this court appointed guardian was trying to find Frankie, and they had done a really thorough job, but could find no location for him once his probation from jail was over.

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No one had seen or heard from Frankie since 1947, when he signed some papers about his mother's estate. This did extend my timeline of his life by two years, But, with no death certificate under any of his aliases and statements that were made by some witnesses who claimed that Frankie was quote, “roaming around,” the court finally concluded that Frankie was alive someplace and that his inheritance would be kept at the city treasury to be picked up by him or by his heirs.

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So, was Frankie dead? Or was Frankie in hiding? Well, the answer could lie in if he ever picked up his inheritance. And, of course, why was my grandmother's fourth husband suing the family? Well, that is a whole other story for a whole other season, people.

Anyway, so even though Maria had all these visions about Frankie, I was still trying to substantiate stuff myself. And the answer would lie in if he ever picked up his inheritance. If he didn't, then he really was just missing since 1947. If he did pick up his inheritance, well, that meant something else.

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This was interesting stuff. It was time for me to call the cousins and see if they knew anything about this. Well, it winds up, they didn't.

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At this point, in 2015, cousins Leo and Carol had passed away. But cousin Leo's daughter suggested that I call her son, Jared, who knew all of his Grandpa Leo's stories.

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I hadn't seen or heard about Jared since he was eight-years-old, running around Grandma Rae's house at that 1988 dinner party at the beginning of our story.

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Well, now 35 years old, Jared and I reconnected like gangbusters, and he had some amazing things to share with me.

It seems as though Jared had loved the stories of Abe and Frankie that his Grandpa Leo would tell him. Although the elders of the family had taken an oath of silence, somehow Leo managed to sprinkle his tales with the uncles and Brooklyn gangster lore all the time.

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It winds up that Leo had taken young Jared around Brooklyn, in much the same way he had taken my father around as a young boy. They were having guy adventures.

Well, on Jared's tour, Leo actually took him to the places where Abe and Frankie hung out. These included the Lincoln Place Headquarters and DuBrow's Cafeteria Restaurant– that place where Abe was last seen alive.

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Well, Jared's shocking revelation was that Leo had also taken him to see the location of Midnight Rose's candy store in Brownsville. That was the Murder Incorporated headquarters. Leo had told Jared that Frankie had been summoned to the infamous location the last day he was seen alive.

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Well, holy snooping! How did Leo know that? Relatives had told me that Frankie had made his last call from a candy store and Jared was now confirming that that candy store was the murder-for-hire mob's home base.

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This was a huge piece of the puzzle. But you know what? It was also really strange, because Murder Incorporated, well, it was dissolved by the end of 1941, after Kid Twist Reles and the Brownsville Boys had either met their deaths or were in prison.

So, who was operating out of Midnight Rose’s in 1947? Could it have just been a nostalgic place where Frankie felt comfortable returning to? Only to then meet up with the wrong crowd? I don't know. It was another mystery for sure.

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Jared wished that he had asked his grandfather more questions at the time. He said to me, Leo knew stuff. And you know what? Leo did know stuff. More than anyone realized or was willing to believe. Leo knew that Abe's body had been moved. He knew that the Attorney General, the DA's office, and a police captain had been stalking Abe.

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Jared and I hypothesized that Leo's knowledge of the Uncles and their death might have been the reason why Leo went into the army in 1943. Leo's father, Mudsy, who was one of Abe's men, may have insisted that Leo get out of town just to keep him out of harm's way.

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So, Jared and I shifted from wondering about the uncles to wondering about Leo. He knew way too many facts to not be more involved in this whole family racket. I mean, my father had once recalled that Leo was collecting money and running numbers, possibly for Uncle Frankie. Jared was anxious to help me do research, and he said, “There's no two better people, Jana, than you and me to get to the bottom of this.”

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And he was right. We had work to do. We needed to look up Leo's military records and find out when he actually returned from the war, to corroborate Mort's story. Now that we knew that Frankie was alive, at least until 1947.

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But then the real clincher came. Leo, who had worked as a butcher most of his life, had confessed on his deathbed to Jared that he had worked for Paul Castellano, running several meat departments across Long Island.

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 Who is Paul Castellano? Oh boy, people, hook-nosed, thin-lipped Castellano had succeeded Carlo Gambino as the head of the Gambino crime family in 1976. Castellano, well, he had considered himself a savvy business guy, and first and foremost, he had learned the butcher trade from his father as a young man.

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Well, one of Castellano's earliest businesses was called Dial Poultry, a meat and poultry distribution company. Castellano and his sons had a coveted corner on the wholesale chicken market by the late 1960s, distributing to over 300 butchers in New York City. Dial Poultry was the sole distributor of poultry and meat to Key Foods, which was where Leo had been a manager.

Could it have been that Leo, just minding his own business, crossed paths with Castellano, who said, “Hey! You want chickens? You're going to have to buy them from us!” Or, who's to say that Leo wasn't remembered as the nephew of Abe "Jew Murphy" Babchick?

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I mean, look, everyone in the underworld was connected. Castellano, well, he was a cousin of Carlo Gambino, and Gambino in his youth had been a member of the Italian Jewish gang, the Young Turks, which Reles and his gang, Uncle Abe, had entryway to. Everyone was connected.

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We really have no way of knowing if Leo was on Dial Poultry's payroll. And saying that Leo worked for Castellano may be way too heavy handed. But you know, it doesn't really matter, because I think what's telling here is that a crime element ran through the family into Leo's generation. That's on both his mother's side, who was Abe's sister, and his father's side, Mudsy, who worked for Abe. This crime element ran into the next generation.

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What we do know as a fact is that Castellano wined and dined Leo and his wife, trying to get Leo to run a chicken racket in Puerto Rico. But his wife wouldn't let him, and Leo refused.

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Jared and I were now in constant contact about finding out clues about Leo and how he knew so much information about the uncles. We discovered that Leo had returned from the army in 1946, one of the few survivors of the Leopoldville disaster in France during World War II. Returning to New York in ‘46, well that would have given Leo a window of over a year to be working with Frankie, who had gotten out of jail in ‘45.

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I loved reconnecting with Cousin Jared. He was kind and inquisitive, and we had a mutual desire to get to the truth about our family history. I really wanted Jared to come on the next Brooklyn adventure as part of the team. But, a month out from the excursion, almost every cousin in the New York area, whether related to the uncles or not, they wanted to come to Brooklyn with me.

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Some were even willing to pay to come along and hear what Maria-the-Psychic had to say. I had to explain to them this was not like buying a ticket to a show. I had Maria to think about, and she didn't want a lot of excess energy on the excursion, which could easily sidetrack her. And, there was limited space in the rented SUV with all of the gear. I had to say no to everyone, but I felt that Jared should be with us. This was as important to him as it was to me.

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So, I asked Maria how she felt about a new cousin tagging along. She thought for a long moment and then replied, “I'm sensing this cousin is an important part of this journey. He should definitely be with us. Bring him.”

So I dialed up Jared and I told him that Maria had actually requested him and he replied in his deep thick Brooklyn accent, “Ohhhhh, shit!”

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Well, it seems we have uncovered three players in this drama who knew too much. The Medical Examiner knew more than he recorded in his incomplete analysis of Abe's body. Was he threatened to do that?

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Uncle Frankie, well he knew something about Abe's death that either pushed him into hiding or called for his elimination by the higher officials. Even J. Edgar Hoover was unwilling to state what information they had on Frankie.

And Cousin Leo, well his stories actually appear to have been true. And I believe he did work for Uncle Frankie at one point. This allowed him close proximity to the truth.

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In some ways, they are each unanswered mysteries. But, I believe that the truth is out there. And these men, well, they knew too much

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Thank you for listening. Join me, Jana Marcus, next time as we go back to Brooklyn for a second adventure.

If you've enjoyed this episode, we would love for you to leave us a review, subscribe to the show, and tell your friends. You can join me in this investigation by checking out the historical files on our website.

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And help me find new clues as well. I'm sure there may be even more information available today. Hey, I mean, did your grandparents live in Brooklyn in the 1940s? Maybe they remember something.

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As a special add on, you can see actual video footage of the team during our investigations in Brooklyn. Find out how on our website at lineofblood-podcast.com.

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And for even more details on our findings, check out the book version of Line of Blood, which is available at all online booksellers.

Special thanks, as always, go out to Suki Wessling, Eric Sassaman, Valerie Marcus Ramshur, and Amy Scott. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.